As it turns out it wasn’t wise of the Adelaide Festival to link Lucy Guerin’s latest work for two dancers, One Single Action in an Ocean of Everything, with her duo Split, “the sell-out hit of the 2018 Adelaide Festival”.

It’s hard to believe it’s been seven years since the entrancing Split was seen. It’s one of those rare works that remains persistently in the memory.

Expectations were therefore high, possibly unfairly so, but One Single Action in an Ocean of Everything – great title, it has to be said – did seem to be posited as a companion piece to Split. Another way of looking at the multiplicity of ways in which two people, thrown into close proximity, might relate to one another.

One Single Action was, unfortunately, a hard, uninvolving slog.

One Single Action in an Ocean of Everything. Photo © Gregory Lorenzutti

For the first half of its 50-minute length Amber McCartney and Geoffrey Watson moved energetically up and down an angled corridor of light, holding and exchanging hammers. Workers, perhaps, who maybe spent a bit of their social time together. The unappealing costume colours of lime green and tan...